Introduction to my Next Book

(Most of the entries on this blog over the last few years are notes and photos pertaining to coaching at Thomas More University and St. Thomas University. I've used the blog as kinda work in progress about the great American coaching book that I was going to one day write. 

That one day is hopefully now. Over the next year or so I'm going to plug away at it, and occasionally I will post chapters or parts of chapters on this blog. Below is the first draft of the introduction.)

    When reading this book I want you to think about, for a moment, the Beatles’ Abbey Road album. They recorded it at the end of their time together, and even though it followed a string of releases that could be considered concept albums (Revolver, St. Peppers, Magical Mystery Tour, Yellow Submarine). Abbey Road really is a mismatch of songs and sounds. If you know the album well, and many music lovers of a certain age do, there is no real continuity or theme to it. But the album, despite this, really does work in its own magical way, and it does contain more than a few great songs. But because many of those songs don’t fit together it makes the Abbey Road work in a very strange and Beatlistic way.

    Like another Beatle album recorded during the same time period The White Album, Abbey Road finds each Beatle going off in his own direction. There are obvious Paul songs (“Oh Darling”); obvious John songs (“Come Together”); and probably for the first time in their recording history the best songs are George songs (“Something,” “Here Comes the Sun”). There is a Ringo song that masquerades as a children’s story (“Octopus Garden”), and there is a string of bits and pieces of songs strung together that has been known over the years as the “Golden Slumbers Medley.” And then the album finishes with a tribute to Queen Elizabeth “Her Majesty.” Pretty goofy ending to a rock classic.

    Yes, Abbey Road is all over the place, but still today a great listen and even the youngest of Beatles fans can sing along to most of the songs.

    Now I’m not trying to compare this book to one of the great albums of the rock era. Heck, even every era of recorded music. But it was put together in much the same way. The format and content have constantly changed over the years. I don’t know how many times one of my fellow coaches asked me when I was going to write my coaching book. At different times it was going to be a novel, then a memoir, a diary of one season, then a diary of two. It was going to be something lighthearted and funny, then it was going to be something deeply personable. Somehow I wanted to include some of the pieces I wrote for publications and websites over the years, but which ones I was unsure of. All I knew was I wanted to write a book about coaching small college football, but everything else I couldn’t decide.

    When I’m home in Cleveland during the summer and breaks from school I try to listen to an album a day from the thousands I have in my house. One day last summer I randomly pulled out Abbey Road and gave it a listen. It was an old scratchy copy that probably goes back to when I shared a bedroom with my brother. Somewhere between “Something” and “Octopus’s Garden” the structure of the book came to me. Heck, if it could work for the Beatles, it could work for me. I figured before I was finished with it, it would go off in all different directions and touch upon all sorts of things. 

    What follows is the coaching small time college football book I have been threatening to write for the last 20 years. In a profession that is highly competitive and transient I’ve been able, for the most part, to coach at good schools with great kids and fellow coaches. This is the story of those coaches. 

     First, but definitely not the last, aside…

    Now even though this is my coaching book it is going to be about a lot of other things beside coaching football, such as music, food, traveling, relationships (who better to talk about relationships than a 60 something college coach who has never been married?), the state of education today, and who knows what else.

    This first aside will be my final thoughts on Abbey Road…

    I recently went back and read some of the original reviews on it. It was not very well received. However, most reviewers, as it often happens, changed their minds over the years and now call it a classic. All those so called experts.

    It spawned three of the more popular Beatle covers, Shirley Bassey’s version of “Something”; Joe Cocker’s “She Came in through the Bathroom Window”; and Aerosmith’s “Come Together.” Along with “Yesterday,” “Something” is often cited as the most covered Beatles’ song. Frank Sinatra considered “Something” his favorite Beatle song and George Harrison his favorite Beatle songwriter. 

Just some of the miscellaneous information that has floated in my brain over the years…

            I probably started this book five or six times. I was never sure whether it was going to be fiction or nonfiction or a combination of the two. I was totally convinced that the 2018 season was going to be my last. It was going to be my fourth season at Thomas More University in Northern Kentucky, not far from Cincinnati. I had had a very good run there, and it was time to turn my position over to a younger guy. It was going to be time to take my book writing seriously.

            I was retired already when my old friend Dave Armstrong dragged me down to Kentucky. I hadn’t coached for a couple of years, as how things had ended at John Carroll University several seasons earlier had left a bad taste in my mouth. 

            However, I had just finished two of the most enjoyable football seasons I had ever had. Instead of coaching football, I became a Vanderbilt Commadore fan, that is where my niece Allyson was cheerleading. Instead of coaching on Saturdays I was usually off to wherever her game was, whether it was Texas A&M or Columbia, South Crolina, or down in Nashville, and I was having a ball.  Plus, for the first time in a long time, Vandy was pretty good. Those years they won more than they lost, even played in a few bowl games, I and whomever I dragged to the games with me, were  having a ball.

            I went to Thomas More because Dave had just hired Regis Scafe as the head coach. I had been with Regis for, I think, 17 seasons, two at Case Western Reserve University and the rest at John Caroll University, all in Clevelsand.  And since it had not ended good at JCU for either of us, especially him, I said what the hell I'd give it a shot.

            Regis coached at Thomas More for three successful seasons, including two league championships followed by two playoff appearances, and I stayed one more. Once again my friend Dave Armstrong threw me a curveball and took the presidency of St. Thomas University in Miami Florida. A school very similar to TMC with one big exception, they did not have a football team. And Dave was going to start a football team. An opportunity to be in on the ground level of a college football team was too big of a temptation and I agreed to accompany Dave to Florida. 

            You are going to read a lot of names of a whole bunch of different coaches at a bunch of different school and to most readers, and to most football fans, they will be unfamiliar. People only hear about when Nick Saban signs a new six million dollar contract, or when Urban Myers gets caught dry humping a girl on dance floor somewhere.

     In the college football world I was in the job of the coaches has not been to get players ready for the NFL, it was to get them ready for life, for the real world. Taking boys and girls out of high school and turning them into young men and women entering the real world, a very important and honorable endeavor in this crazy world.